WordPress in an Hour or Less: The Get It Done Guide to Installing and Using WordPress (7 page)

If you don’t already have
a custom menu in place, the first step is to create one. Enter a title in the Menu Name box, and click Create Menu. (It does not matter what you call the menu; I typically use a name of ‘mainmenu’, but that’s a habit from my past years as a database programmer.)

Once you create a menu, you will see all the options at the left become available for your use on the menu. These include all of your site’s pages, as well as any post categories and custom links that you choose to add.

At the left side of the screen, turn on the check boxes beside the pages you want to add to your menu, then click the Add to Menu button beneath that group of items. When you do this, you will see all of your selected menu items appear on the right side of the screen, similar to the example shown here:

You can now proceed to rearrange the menu options in the order you would
like them to appear, by simply dragging each item up or down on the screen. And you can make a menu item a
child
of a
parent
menu item, by dragging that “child” menu item to the right underneath the “parent” menu item. In the example that follows, the Photo Examples, Audio Samples, and Video Samples menu items will all appear as child menus under the ‘Learn WordPress’ parent menu.

The final step, once you’ve saved your custom menu, is to choose w
here it should appear, using the Theme Location options at the left side of the screen. The number of these will vary depending on the theme that you are using, but nearly all themes support a Primary navigation area. Some themes, like the example shown in the next illustration, support a menu for mobile devices, such as iPads and smartphones. Select the menu name that you assigned the menu earlier, and click Save.

Tha
t’s all you need for your custom menu. You can preview your site by clicking your site’s name in the toolbar. An example of the end result of the menu choices selected earlier is shown in the illustration that follows. Note that the “Learn WordPress” parent menu has the three child menus arranged beneath the parent menu.

If the order of menu items doesn’t suit you,
simply go back to the Menus screen and rearrange the menu items to suit your tastes, then click Save to save the changes to the menu. You can remove any item from a menu by selecting that item and clicking Remove.

At times you will need to supply a way for viewers of your site to easily jump from one location to another. This is where links will prove useful. The location that a user jumps to may be within the site (called an internal link), or completely outside the site (known as an external link). You may have noticed the default set of links that appear on the sidebar of a page or post with the Twenty Eleven theme, if you have not disabled the default display of sidebars for the current page or for an entire theme. That default display of links is shown in the example here which displays a portion of a sidebar:

The default set of links is called the blogroll, and the links that are contained within the blogroll can be changed from the Dashboard. Log into WordPress, get to your Dashboard, and choose Links from the menus. You’ll see the Links screen, an example of which is shown here.

All of the links presently in your sidebar are visible here. You can delete any links that are not wanted, by turning on the check boxes at the far left for one or more unwanted links, then choosing Delete from the drop-down at the lower left and clicking the ‘Apply’ button.

To add a new link, get to the Dashboard, and under Links, click Add New. You will see the Add New Link screen, shown here:

In the Name field, you enter the text that you want the link to display in the sidebar as the link. Under Web Address, if it an external link, you enter the URL of the other site, including the
http://
designation that precedes a web site address. (An external link will not operate properly if you omit the .’http’ reference.)

The Description is optional; if you fill one in, it appears as a tool tip when a user holds the mouse stationary over the link.)

If you are linking to a page or a post that is elsewhere inside your own WordPress site, you will need to know the page or post ID number. You can quickly find the ID number for a post or a page by looking at the number that immediately follows the question mark in your browser address bar whenever a post or page is visible on the screen.

Once you know this value, you place the following in the web address field of the Add New Link screen if it is a post, substituting your actual ID number for the value ‘123’ in the example:

Post Title

And  you place the following in the web address field if it is a page, substituting your actual ID number for the value ‘123’ in the example:

Page title

By default, all links appear in a category called ‘Blogroll.’ However, you can easily create new categories for your links, by choosing Links > Link Categories from the Dashboard, and defining the new category in the screen that appears. Then when you add a new link at the Add New Link screen, you can place the link in your newly defined category.

A decision that you will need to make regarding your site is whether or not you want to provide viewers with the ability to comment on your posts and / or pages.  If you look at any of the pages that you've created following this tutorial, you will see that each page has a comment area at the bottom of the page, where viewers can add comments about your posts or page content.  Depending on what you are using your site for, you may or may not want to provide viewers with this capability.

Enabling (or disabling) comments is a simple matter, and you can do this for individual pages or posts, or globally for the entire site.  If you want to disable the ability to comment for an individual page or post, from the Dashboard, select 'All Pages' or 'All Posts' to display all of your pages or posts, hold the mouse stationary over the desired page or post name, and click Quick Edit. When the Quick Edit screen appears, turn off the 'Allow Comments' check box and click Update, to prevent comments on that particular page or post.